To the young man who still clutched the silver dollar sleep was impossible. A multitude of exciting fancies crossed his brain. The developments he hoped to bring about, the curious solution of the problem, its effect upon his future, and the future of one so dear to him,—all this murdered sleep for him as effectually as did the crime on Lady Macbeth's soul. It drove him into the smoking-car, where he sank into a seat and planned and conjectured between puffs of Havana smoke until the train reached Albany. So completely absorbed had he become in the solution of this knotty problem in which his accident of the morning had involved him, and so convinced was he that the information must be for the time kept a secret, that he actually began to dread what was clearly inevitable,—the explanation he must shortly make to his wife.
His inclination was to tell her all. His duty to others forbade this. After pondering over the matter, he decided to explain that he had a happy surprise in store for her, one that had an important bearing on their future, and which unfortunately necessitated a change in their plans for a honeymoon in Europe.
This, on reaching the Delavan House, he expressed to a very pretty and very anxious little woman who was awaiting him, together with a good many other things not necessary to this story. And, instead of the steamer for Europe, the reunited pair took a train for Philadelphia. Early the next day the young man presented himself at the office of Dr. James Wickliffe, at Germantown, who smilingly admitted having given the shining dollar to his mother two days before. He had received the coin from a patient, a letter-carrier named John Lennon, and remembered it because of the following strange story, related to him by Lennon himself.
A few days before, the carrier was engaged in delivering mail from door to door along Vine Street, Philadelphia, when a zigzag trip across the street and back again brought him to the narrow stairway of a dingy brick house, in front of which hung an enormous brass key bearing the word "Locksmith." Here he paused to draw a little parcel from his bundle. As he did so he heard something fall with a metallic clink upon the stone pavement. He looked and saw that it was a silver dollar, which rolled toward the gutter and came to a stop close by the curb. Hastening to pick it up, he instantly dropped it with a cry of pain.
The coin was almost red hot!
The letter-carrier stood nursing his hand and thinking for two or three minutes. Silver dollars do not commonly drop out of the sky. But that this one should thus fall like a meteorite in a condition too heated for handling was certainly more than surprising—it was astounding! The man looked up at the dingy brick house and examined it attentively, noting that the ground floor was occupied as a green grocery and that all of the windows were shut save one in the third story.
Then he kicked the mysterious coin into a puddle, fished it out again with his fingers, and put it into his trousers' pocket. He was about to investigate further, when some small boys called his attention to the fact that it was the first day of April, whereupon he proceeded on his way. He gave no further thought to the matter until that night, when he found that his thumb and fore-finger had been so badly burned as to require treatment.
The next morning he called upon the doctor, who dressed the painful hand and received the mysterious coin in payment for his services.
That night, behind locked doors in one of the officers' rooms of the United States Mint in Chestnut Street, two men were engaged in a long whispered conference. The wife of one of the men, as she sat in her room in the Continental Hotel, anxiously waiting for her husband, was beginning to wonder whether, after all, marriage was a failure!
Two days later, in speaking of the seizure of over forty thousand bogus silver dollars and the clever capture of three of the most dangerous counterfeiters that ever attacked the currency of the United States, the Daily News said:—